An exercise in dispelling the myth that all in suburbia is banal and pointless only to find that, by and large, it actually is and that, more importantly, it is beautiful in its ordinariness.

Monday, January 23, 2006

The Observer Front Page

I was sad when the whale died. Poor bugger should have been keeping his bottle-nose clean in the North Sea and not trying to capsize coxless fours from the Putney Rowing Club, though we’d have all laughed if he had. Instead we all witnessed the desperate attempt to put the thing back where it belonged only for it to give it up a the last moment. Classy of the whale in a way but sad nevertheless.I was sad when the Observer gave some of page 1 and all of pages 2 and 3 over to covering the story in great detail with charts and diagrams. Some wag even stuck ‘whale’ into a bible search engine and found it that the word appears four times in the Bible but never in the book of Jonah. (‘Big fish’ in case you were wondering.)I was sad when I saw the rest of the Observer’s front page given over Mark Oaten’s resignation in the midst of him having an affair with a rent boy. A career in tatters because of an indiscretion and an attempt to conceal it. Personally I’m not in favour of casual sex but why should I care who he shags?The Observer is a good paper but it’s a crazy world we live in. What ever happened to pages 2 and 3 on how Japan and Norway flagrantly flaunt the International Whaling Commission’s rulings on banning whale hunting, joining the USA, Canada, Denmark and Russia in the blubber fest?What ever happened to articles that expose the intellectual and ethical hypocrisy in our demands that our politicians live to some moral standard that none of us could ever attain?I dunno sometimes.